Toronto 505 University | 212.89m | 64s | Cartareal Corp | BDP Quadrangle

Ordinary building. Nothing to drool over.
What makes it ordinary to you? It's sort of sad that you can't see the beauty in something this stately, clean, and simple. Not every building should scream at you.
One persons trash is another persons treasure... you can't make somebody "like" a building if they don't.
People can learn to appreciate things they may not have in the past. You can't make them though, you're right about that.
 
One persons trash is another persons treasure... you can't make somebody "like" a building if they don't.

And precisely why we need stringent preservation rules to guard a nation's treasures from being lost forever.

We can safeguard treasured works of art inside galleries/museums but, unfortunately, we can't do the same for architecturally important buildings. Their continued survival rests on persistently and aggressively protecting buildings from those that don't value them.
 
Even if someone doesn't like a particular aesthetic, can they not recognize quality when they see it? Sometimes Toronto feels unstoppable. On occasions like this, I wonder if this city will ever fulfill its potential. How deflating.
 
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Ordinary building. Nothing to drool over.
What don’t you like about it or find uninteresting?

I’m no architecture grad or critic, so take my thoughts with a huge grain of salt. What I see here is restraint and coherence. Unlike modern condos, where architects seem to throw multiple styles at a building in a misguided attempt to foster interest, here we have one major design idea well executed. And, there are a few flourishes that balance out the main idea and prevent it from being too repetitive (the top floor, and the band in the center of the building). I also like the way the building hits the street, and its orientation; you don’t see a lot of that nowadays.
 
68C561C4-FE22-4ADA-891E-73AFE5B2FCC0.jpeg
 
Not to sidetrack Alex' fine point...........

But I have a linguistic quibble................why 'seminal'....... I'm not one for re-writing language for its own sake or getting caught up in assorted, imagined 'isms'.........but seminal has a very specific original meaning.........

Of, or like Semen.

Why not ovate?

I mean why does only one sex'es sexual product get all the credit for innovation?

LOL

Yes, my tongue is in my cheek..........and yet..........

Edit to add:

It occurs to me that bias originates from the idea that the semen changes the egg.

I wonder why it occurred to no one that perhaps the egg changed the semen.
It takes 2 to tango.
 
It takes 2 to tango.
Not to sidetrack Alex' fine point...........

But I have a linguistic quibble................why 'seminal'....... I'm not one for re-writing language for its own sake or getting caught up in assorted, imagined 'isms'.........but seminal has a very specific original meaning.........

Of, or like Semen.

Why not ovate?

I mean why does only one sex'es sexual product get all the credit for innovation?

LOL

Yes, my tongue is in my cheek..........and yet..........

Edit to add:

It occurs to me that bias originates from the idea that the semen changes the egg.

I wonder why it occurred to no one that perhaps the egg changed the semen.
Oxford Dictionaries:
sem·i·nal
/ˈsemən(ə)l/
adjective
1. (of a work, event, moment, or figure) strongly influencing later developments.
"his seminal work on chaos theory"
2. relating to or denoting semen.
"the spermatozoa are washed to separate them from the seminal plasma"

Northern Light, I dislike that first listed sense of the word at least as much as you do. As far as I know it was never used this way until the early 1990s, when I first started noticing it in places like album reviews in Now Magazine 🤮 and The Toronto Star 🙄. It reeks of proto-hipster/wokesters with unusual eyeglass frames, funny haircuts, pinched faces and unearned airs of superiority, sitting at tables in the lobbies outside classrooms at plate-glass universities, who I'm sure started using it to delight in provoking precisely the reaction you (and I) had.

But it's in the ridiculously permissive dictionaries now, which means it's too late to do anything about it except scrupulously never using it. Today writers use it either unknowingly or in order to come across as writerly and more-learned-than-thou, not realizing that they are not writerly, not learned, and actually have a shallow-rooted and impoverished feel for English. But at least once in a while there's a decent and usable neologism, and a perfect example is the one that describes this sense of 'seminal' to a tee: cringy.
 
Oxford Dictionaries:
sem·i·nal
/ˈsemən(ə)l/
adjective
1. (of a work, event, moment, or figure) strongly influencing later developments.
"his seminal work on chaos theory"
2. relating to or denoting semen.
"the spermatozoa are washed to separate them from the seminal plasma"

Northern Light, I dislike that first listed sense of the word at least as much as you do. As far as I know it was never used this way until the early 1990s, when I first started noticing it in places like album reviews in Now Magazine 🤮 and The Toronto Star 🙄. It reeks of proto-hipster/wokesters with unusual eyeglass frames, funny haircuts, pinched faces and unearned airs of superiority, sitting at tables in the lobbies outside classrooms at plate-glass universities, who I'm sure started using it to delight in provoking precisely the reaction you (and I) had.

But it's in the ridiculously permissive dictionaries now, which means it's too late to do anything about it except scrupulously never using it. Today writers use it either unknowingly or in order to come across as writerly and more-learned-than-thou, not realizing that they are not writerly, not learned, and actually have a shallow-rooted and impoverished feel for English. But at least once in a while there's a decent and usable neologism, and a perfect example is the one that describes this sense of 'seminal' to a tee: cringy.

Now that was a quality rant! :)

Edit to add:

Collins Dictionary has a volume of usage trendline for the word:

1678492636754.png

From: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/seminal
 
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I have a column up today about this project, and about how planning is shaping land economics to make this sort of thing happen:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/art...earing-down-tall-buildings-ask-city-planning/
Thanks for the heads-up and link to your column. I appreciate your effort to save the building, but I fear you made few allies and many enemies by tying it in with a plea to tear down houses in residential neighbourhoods and replace them with mid-rise apartment buildings. Maybe you should have at least defined what you meant by mid-rise. If I had to guess, I'd say it meant taller than 6 storeys and fewer than 20, but others may have sensed something more like 12-25. I don't know. Anyway, replacing houses with anything will do nothing to relieve the shortage of housing, in much the same way that building freeways provides no long-term relief of road congestion, but simply causes cars to appear out of nowhere and clog them up in no time at all. Build a million apartments and word of it will reach millions of people across the country and around the world very quickly. A million-and-a-quarter of them will show up in person.

If you go after the 505 proposal in The Globe again—and please do!—I urge you to focus on the present building's rare good looks and for heaven's sake keep old houses out of it. They can be left as they are while countless ugly monstrosities around the core are torn down and replaced with countless millions of square feet of residential, office and commercial space. At the very least please recommend that if any old houses are green-lighted for demolition, they be replaced by quiet very-low-rise buildings—except along main streets, where taller buildings are fine. I'm ok with 6-25 storey blocks on Dundas, Dupont or Bathurst, but let's not try to recreate the St. George north of Bloor model all over the city.

Doing that wouldn't make Toronto better, just unbearably crowded. It would also signal to lifetime residents and newcomers alike that everything about the city has to go—including all the social traditions that made it liveable and not a hellhole in the first place.
 

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